Spent yesterday in bed with a book and Lost DVDs, trying very hard not to cough in order to avoid hideous back spasms. Was surprised by how well the supposedly-meandering third season of Lost holds up when the episodes are viewed back to back. Yes, there are some dodgy elements (chiefly Nikki and Paolo, the very short-lived experiment in showing us some of the other crash survivors) but the narrative is tighter than I remembered. I suspect the middle to late season may sag a little though.
Anyway, I feel better today.
Now that I have spent a week on Facebook, I suspect that it really demands a lot more time than I will be prepared to afford it. It’s good to have an easy means of occasionally touching base with my various cousins and rarely-seen old school buddies, but I daresay that it will not supplant blogging as my preferred medium for contact with the outside world.
In a related topic, while being exposed to near-lethal doses of daytime television of late, I’ve had the chance to observe Twitter’s transition from “kind of cool thing that only teenagers and hipster geeks have heard of” to mainstream penetration. In the last four weeks virtually every daily news/entertainment/variety show in Australian television has suddenly realised that they can create the illusion of audience participation by letting you know that their co-anchors are”currently in makeup” or “changing shirts after being peed on by that koala”. You know that when the morning newsertainment shows have a Twitter feed that it is officially no longer cool. Notch up one more geek meme that passed me by without interference. I’ll catch the next one when I can be bothered getting a mobile telephony device that can keep up (my current one has a monochrome LCD display and no camera, to give you some idea of its vintage).
Having completed all outstanding property purchases a couple of weeks ago, we have now entered the “paying all the problems that were not previously apparent” stage of property ownership. Apparently at one of our places the tenants have nailed boards across several doors in order to prevent the kids from getting through. If that were the worst of it it probably won’t bother us (the place was cheap for a reason) but I suspect that more improvised renovations are waiting to be discovered. Hopefully they haven’t been arseing about with anything electrical. We are bracing ourselves for this initial period of landlord operations, which is likely to prove a little on the expensive side. We’ll just grit our teeth and remind ourselves that this is a long term investment project. Over and over again, probably.
I’m not writing anything at the moment, by the way. Quelle surprise, eh what? But I have been reading John “He Died with a Felafel in his Hand” Birmingham’s latest post-Tom Clancy technoporn thriller Without Warning, which could easily have been written in response to the loudmouth assertions of some arsehole in a pub (not the least credible motive ever for a novel by any means). It starts with the premise that the world would be better off without the United States (a view that I, in the somewhat distant past, was known to assert in my more pompous moments) and then proceeds to systematically dismantle that assertion with a plausible progression of increasingly horrible events. It’s interesting that, aside from the occasional deliberate jingoistic note and the obligatory hypercompetent spy, for me the most compelling sequences were the speculations about shifts in the global political landscape. And his conclusion, that despite its flaws we’re kind of screwed without the damned Yankees, is pretty hard to refute.
My only real complaint is that it wasn’t long enough – most of Africa and Asia are scarcely mentioned, and Europe and South America only in key patches. If Birmingham had churned out a book twice as long, I’d have eaten it up twice as happily. He writes well, that lad. I knew he’d go far. Never thought he’d go where he has, but more power to him.
So, what have you been up to then?